Early Australian Voyages, by John Pinkerton

Introduction.

In the days of Plato, imagination found its way, before the mariners, to a new world across the
Atlantic, and fabled an Atlantis where America now stands. In the days of Francis Bacon, imagination of the English
found its way to the great Southern Continent before the Portuguese or Dutch sailors had sight of it, and it was the
home of those wise students of God and nature to whom Bacon gave his New Atlantis. The discoveries of America date from
the close of the fifteenth century. The discoveries of Australia date only from the beginning of the seventeenth. The
discoveries of the Dutch were little known in England before the time of Dampier’s voyage, at the close of the
seventeenth century, with which this volume ends. The name of New Holland, first given by the Dutch to the land they
discovered on the north-west coast, then extended to the continent and was since changed to Australia.

During the eighteenth century exploration was continued by the English. The good report of Captain Cook caused the
first British settlement to be made at Port Jackson, in 1788, not quite a hundred years ago, and the foundations were
then laid of the settlement of New South Wales, or Sydney. It was at first a penal colony, and its Botany Bay was a
name of terror to offenders. Western Australia, or Swan River, was first settled as a free colony in 1829, but
afterwards used also as a penal settlement; South Australia, which has Adelaide for its capital, was first established
in 1834, and colonised in 1836; Victoria, with Melbourne for its capital, known until 1851 as the Port Philip District,
and a dependency of New South Wales, was first colonised in 1835. It received in 1851 its present name. Queensland,
formerly known as the Moreton Bay District, was established as late as 1859. A settlement of North Australia was tried
in 1838, and has since been abandoned. On the other side of Bass’s Straits, the island of Van Diemen’s Land, was named
Tasmania, and established as a penal colony in 1803.

Advance, Australia! The scattered handfuls of people have become a nation, one with us in race, and character, and
worthiness of aim. These little volumes will, in course of time, include many aids to a knowledge of the shaping of the
nations. There will be later records of Australia than these which tell of the old Dutch explorers, and of the first
real awakening of England to a knowledge of Australia by Dampier’s voyage.

The great Australian continent is 2,500 miles long from east to west, and 1,960 miles in its greatest breadth. Its
climates are therefore various. The northern half lies chiefly within the tropics, and at Melbourne snow is seldom seen
except upon the hills. The separation of Australia by wide seas from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, gives it
animals and plants peculiarly its own. It has been said that of 5,710 plants discovered, 5,440 are peculiar to that
continent. The kangaroo also is proper to Australia, and there are other animals of like kind. Of 58 species of
quadruped found in Australia, 46 were peculiar to it. Sheep and cattle that abound there now were introduced from
Europe. From eight merino sheep introduced in 1793 by a settler named McArthur, there has been multiplication into
millions, and the food-store of the Old World begins to be replenished by Australian mutton.

The unexplored interior has given a happy hunting-ground to satisfy the British spirit of adventure and research;
but large waterless tracts, that baffle man’s ingenuity, have put man’s powers of endurance to sore trial.

The mountains of Australia are all of the oldest rocks, in which there are either no fossil traces of past life, or
the traces are of life in the most ancient forms. Resemblance of the Australian cordilleras to the Ural range, which he
had especially been studying, caused Sir Roderick Murchison, in 1844, to predict that gold would be found in Australia.
The first finding of gold — the beginning of the history of the Australian gold-fields — was in February, 1851, near
Bathurst and Wellington, and today looks back to the morning of yesterday in the name of Ophir, given to the Bathurst
gold-diggings.

Gold, wool, mutton, wine, fruits, and what more Australia can now add to the commonwealth of the English-speaking
people, Englishmen at home have been learning this year in the great Indian and Colonial Exhibition, which is to stand
always as evidence of the numerous resources of the Empire, as aid to the full knowledge of them, and through that to
their wide diffusion. We are a long way now from the wrecked ship of Captain Francis Pelsart, with which the histories
in this volume begin.

John Pinkerton was born at Edinburgh in February, 1758, and died in Paris in March, 1826, aged sixty-eight. He was
the best classical scholar at the Lanark grammar school; but his father, refusing to send him to a university, bound
him to Scottish law. He had a strong will, fortified in some respects by a weak judgment. He wrote clever verse; at the
age of twenty-two he went to London to support himself by literature, began by publishing “Rimes” of his own, and then
Scottish Ballads, all issued as ancient, but of which he afterwards admitted that fourteen out of the seventy-three
were wholly written by himself. John Pinkerton, whom Sir Walter Scott described as “a man of considerable learning, and
some severity as well as acuteness of disposition,” made clear conscience on the matter in 1786, when he published two
volumes of genuine old Scottish Poems from the MS. collections of Sir Richard Maitland. He had added to his credit as
an antiquary by an Essay on Medals, and then applied his studies to ancient Scottish History, producing learned books,
in which he bitterly abused the Celts. It was in 1802 that Pinkerton left England for Paris, where he supported himself
by indefatigable industry as a writer during the last twenty-four years of his life. One of the most useful of his many
works was that General Collection of the best and most interesting Voyages and Travels of the World, which
appeared in seventeen quarto volumes, with maps and engravings, in the years 1808~1814. Pinkerton abridged and digested
most of the travellers’ records given in this series, but always studied to retain the travellers’ own words, and his
occasional comments have a value of their own.